In the Orchard

About this artwork

Guthrie worked on this large-scale painting between 1885 and 1886. For part of that time he was staying at Cockburnspath, a small village near the Berwickshire coast, but he also worked on it in Glasgow and Kirkcudbright. The painting’s size was unusual for the time given the everyday subject matter. Large canvases were normally reserved for epic historical or religious themes. It shows a young boy and girl collecting windfall apples in an orchard as sunlight shimmers through the trees. Guthrie struggled with the challenges posed by working on such a scale; it forced him to use broad brushwork to achieve the naturalistic representation that he was seeking. The sketchbook that Guthrie used while staying at Cockburnspath is in the Scottish National Gallery’s Print Room, and it reveals his experiments with the composition of this picture (D 4052).

Purchased jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2012

For much of the nineteenth century, the story of Scottish art was dominated by Edinburgh and the Royal Scottish Academy. Towards the end of that century, however, it was the dynamic city of Glasgow, thriving as a major centre for industry and commerce, that had become the focus for new movements in art, architecture and design. Encouraged by a growing number of wealthy mercantile collectors, a wave of talented painters emerged in the 1880s, later to be dubbed the ‘Glasgow School’ although they preferred the term ‘Glasgow Boys’. The group consisted of a loose band of friendships between more than twenty artists working at different sites across Scotland. What they had in common was a disdain for dry academic practices and a desire for a fresh, vigorous style of painting based on direct observation.

James Guthrie was a pivotal figure among the Glasgow Boys. Born in Greenock and educated in law at Glasgow University, he was largely self-taught as a painter although he did study for a while under the Scottish artist John Pettie in London. Contact with recent developments in French art was an important catalyst in his artistic development and, after a trip to Paris in 1882, his handling of paint became bolder and he began to work outdoors, directly from nature. By 1884 he had settled in Cockburnspath, a remote farming village south of Edinburgh near the Berwickshire coast, living in the midst of his rural subjects.

Guthrie made some of his finest work during this period including A Hind’s Daughter, 1883, also in the Gallery’s collection, which is a magnificent exercise in realist painting with a sombre mood of impending winter. But he struggled to translate his interest in light and atmosphere on to a more ambitious scale and to create more complicated compositions with figures in a convincing outdoor setting. At least one large canvas was abandoned and he laboured long and hard over others. In the Orchard was begun in Cockburnspath but Guthrie seems to have continued to work on this large canvas in Glasgow and Kirkcudbright. The encrusted paint surface of the picture is one indication of the effort that went into its production. A sketchbook in the Scottish National Gallery which has numerous studies for this work also hints at some of the challenges that he faced in trying to construct his composition. The final result, however, is a successful combination of French-inspired techniques with Victorian sentiment. The two, slightly self-absorbed children are not engaged in any arduous rural task but gather windfall apples in an idyllic orchard. The colour scheme is generally muted but enlivened with patches of brighter blues and greens to represent the dappled sunlight.

The finished picture was well received when it was shown in Edinburgh, Paris and at a breakthrough exhibition of Scottish art at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1890. Later that year, Guthrie was among the Glasgow Boys whose work was shown at an international exhibition in Munich. In the Orchard was singled out for particular praise and the Scottish works at that exhibition would have an important influence on painters of the Munich school.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.

Sir James Guthrie

Sir James Guthrie

Guthrie became one of the leading painters in the group of artists called the Glasgow Boys. His early works of rural subjects painted with broad square brush strokes show the strong influence of French painters such as Bastien-Lepage. Guthrie was born in Greenock and trained as a lawyer before turning…